Underground History Monitor Tests

Introduction

Please note: Most of these tests were designed back in the era when most people used the old style CRT monitors. They're not as relevant in this age when the vast majority are using LCD displays - but I've left this page here (for now) for historic reasons. This PLUGE pattern test is largely irrelevant for LCD displays.

Since I've been maintaining this web site, several people have commented that the images appear too dark (it is all underground y'know...) and also some say that the background image can appear too bright on their monotor, or the pictures look a bit grubby.

All I can say is that they look fine on my monitor, which is correctly calibrated for video and image editing. However, as time passes I've seen the pages on other computers and some monitors have shocking settings making the pages almost unreadable or in other cases the pictures barely visible.

Not long ago, I was watching a THX DVD which had a section where you could calibrate your speakers and television for optimum viewing pleasure and it gave me the idea of providing a similar facility for my web site.

Here, I've attempted to create some simple test patterns so that you can check to see if your monitor is actually set to sensible values. I'm not saying you should change the values as you're probably used to the ones you use - all I'm saying is that this is roughly how my monitor was calibrated when creating these pages and if some of these tests don't work for you, you may not be seeing the pages and images as they were meant to be seen.

Please note that these tests were created when most people were still using CRT monitors. They're not as relevent today where the majority of people are using LCD monitors which are far better tuned.